Score One for John McCain

For an entertaining and accurate analysis on the first Presidential debate last night, check out S.E. Cupp’s article published in the New York Daily News.

She’s also the co-author of the newly published, Why You’re Wrong About the Right: Behind the Myths: The Surprising Truth About Conservatives.

Here’s the article:

Archie Manning, the great patriarch of the Manning clan, quarterbacked the first national, prime time broadcast of a college football game for Ole Miss in 1969, and threw 436 yards and three touchdowns. In the end, Mississippi lost 33-32 to Alabama, but he is nonetheless sacrosanct in Oxford. His uniform number, 18, is the official speed limit on campus.

That close game, and Manning’s heroics in it, was mirrored in the presidential debate held at this historic university, founded in 1848, more than a decade before the start of the Civil War. And in a campaign season of hail mary passes by McCain, he was the quarterback that came out the victor.

Even though this biggest of games almost didn’t happen, it was filled with a litany of expected plays, the usual teeter-tottering between offense and defense, and had a number of key touchdowns that McCain arguably needed to erase the memory of what was without question a shaky week for the Republican candidate.

Throughout the debate, which focused on both the economy and foreign policy, McCain had facts, figures and names at his fingertips, speaking from decades of experience in the trenches – literally and figuratively – and repeated the phrase, “Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand . . .” He called Obama naive, dangerous and inexperienced, and his attacks, which seemed to frustrate Obama, put him on the defensive for the majority of the night.

Obama’s expectations here were low. Foreign policy is McCain’s strength and Obama merely had to hold his own to come away from this unscathed. He did – in the first third of the night, devoted to the economy, Obama performed well, invoking the clauses that Democratic voters want to hear. But he seemed at times too cool, even verging on arrogant.

In an early stumble, he couldn’t give any concrete examples of how the current economic crisis would affect his budget were he to become President, even when pressed repeatedly by the moderator, Jim Lehrer. McCain proposed spending freezes and defense cuts.

When the debate turned to foreign policy, McCain pressed him on his failure over a long period to visit Afghanistan, though Obama repeatedly stressed that this was where he would focus his foreign policy efforts in the war on terror. And here, Obama awkwardly brought up his running mate Joe Biden, seeming to suggest that what Obama lacked, Biden would make up for.

But McCain’s biggest score was when Obama relayed the lesson he’s learned from Iraq: that we never should have gone there in the first place. McCain rightly pointed out that the job of the next U.S. president will not be to ruminate over why we went or whether it was a good idea, but to determine how and when to leave. Obama had a difficult time dancing around the success of the surge, which he has long been reluctant to admit.

And on Iran, Obama’s past embrace of conditionless diplomatic meetings with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other leaders of rogue regimes came back to haunt him. McCain effectively cornered him, asking, “We’re going to sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, and we say, No you’re not?”

This was not a rout. Obama had some moments that will probably please his supporters. But in all, it was not his best night. Obama vacillated between a desire to appear merely antithetical to McCain and Bush at all costs and a desire to position himself as a prescient and independent thinker on foreign policy. His responses essentially alternated between “I wouldn’t have done that,” and “I argued to do that months ago.” But Monday-morning quarterbacks have an uncanny way of knowing all the answers.

McCain may not be, as he put it, Miss Congeniality in the Senate or with the current administration. But in this game at least, he made the case for captain of the football team.

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